Monday, January 12, 2009

Annals of plagiarism

I seize the opportunity to congratulate [the authors of the original paper] for their previous and fundamental paper — in fact that article inspired our work.
-- A plagiarizer

This beauty appears at the end of this Nature story (probably behind a paywall) on the text-matching software eTBlast which has been used to catch "thousands" of similarities between papers.

BTW, it's the same software that was used to catch a plagiarized paper from Anna University Sri Venkateswara University [Update: Sorry for this mistake; thanks to Rahul for pointing it out in his comment.] last year.

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Comments:

Small correction: the plagiarised paper case that you link to was from Sri Venkateshwara University. The Anna University case (at least, the one I'm familiar with) was spotted by the authors of the original paper: no software was required.

Actually those software tools to catch plagiarism comes under the category of Science2.0 tools (web2.0 applied to science) that has the potential to revolutionize scientific research and traditional libraries. It would be interesting if the Indian academic sector enrolls/channels its IT (& computer science) prowess into that arena.